Mellon Emeritus Fellowship
Alan Trachtenberg, the Neil Gray Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American studies, has been awarded an Emeritus Fellowship by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the first year of the foundation's new program.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Emeritus Fellowships, inaugurated in 2003, provide research support for "outstanding" retired scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have continued to be active and productive in their scholarly pursuits.
Trachtenberg will use the award to write a monograph on the photographic work of Wright Morris (1910-1998), the American photographer and novelist.
His project requires extensive travel to the major archives of Morris' works, as well as visits to collections of related materials in Arizona, Texas and Washington, D.C.
Trachtenberg has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1969, and has served as chair and director of graduate studies in American studies. His scholarly work has focused on American cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries, including topics in literature and the history of photography.
His books include "Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans" (winner of the National Museum of American Art's Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in American art); "Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol"; and "The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age." A forum on the latter work appears in the Winter 2004 issue of the journal American Literary History. It includes papers delivered at a panel commemorating the 20th anniversary of the book at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 2002.
The Yale faculty member has also edited or contributed to a number of other books, including "The American Image" and "Classic Essays on Photography" and "Documenting America, 1935-1943."
More recently, Trachtenberg has explored representations of American Indians in the literary, political and popular culture of the United States in the early 20th century. His book "Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1890-1930" is forthcoming in the fall of 2004. A selection of his essays will be published in 2005.
Trachtenberg holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota. He has held visiting professorships at universities in the U.S. and abroad, including Leningrad State University and Doshisha University in Japan.
His honors include the International Center of Photography's Writing Award for 1991 and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1992-1993 and held the Times Mirror Foundation Distinguished Fellowship in American Studies at the Huntington Library in 1998-1999.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the country. It makes grants on a selective basis to institutions in higher education; museums and art conservation; performing arts; population; conservation and the environment; and public affairs. Trachtenberg is one of 16 fellows selected from amongst the nominations submitted by universities and colleges from across the country that were invited to participate.
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